25
Farley, Wyoming
Fresh from a touch of Red’s power, Rooster had strength in reserves. A little stiff in his bad knee when he crouched down, but nothing he couldn’t grimace against and go on through. For the first few minutes, after Jack’s wife – a plump, motherly sort with the kind of smile that made him think of sweet tea and fresh cookies – took Red into the house with her, he panicked a little. Standing in the center of the carriage house, opening and closing his hands into fists, breathing raggedly through his mouth. What if that woman had–? What if Red was–?
What if, what if, what if. He ran a dozen disastrous scenarios, blood humming, drawn as if by hooks toward the house, his charge, his responsibility. His girl. His…
Everything.
“She’s safe,” he chanted. “She’s safe, she’s safe.”
And she was. He could look across the fairytale garden yard and see her through a window in the kitchen, rolling out dough with a big wooden rolling pin alongside Jack’s wife, Vicki.
It was…it was okay. It was good, even. Red had never had a mother, or an aunt, or a grandmother, or hell, even a friend. She deserved the chance to make cookies with a kind woman. She deserved more–
But he couldn’t let himself go down that road. Not now. He had a job to do.
She he tugged on the worn leather gloves Jack had left him, picked up a hammer and crowbar, and started pulling up rotted floorboards.
It was hard work. Good work. Productive, and steady. Not frustrating. He had no idea how long he was at it, but when Jack’s footfalls announced his arrival with two frosty longnecks hanging from one hand, the shadows lay long and distorted across what was left of the floor.
Rooster wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and realized he was sweating all over, his jeans and t-shirt glued to his skin. He felt tired and heavy in a pleasant way, buzzing with positive exertion.
Jack whistled. “Makin’ some progress, I see.”
“Trying to.”
And this was easy: falling back into casual camaraderie with someone. He hadn’t known that it would be, but it didn’t take any effort to move to the carriage house porch, accept a beer and sit down next to his host.
“Hmm,” Jack hummed. “I haven’t been able to do shit like that in years. It’s hell to get old. I appreciate it.”
Rooster took a long sip of his beer, and didn’t answer. He felt like he didn’t need to. They sat side-by-side on the porch, legs dangling over the edge, songbirds trilling their final chorus before the crickets took over.
Peaceful. Rooster knew peace never lasted.
“Your girlfriend,” Jack started, and there it was. Tension. “She’s a sweetheart. We don’t have any granddaughters, so you’ll be lucky if Vicki gives her back.” He chuckled like it was funny, but Rooster gripped his bottle so tight he thought it might shatter.
Jack noticed. He lowered his beer, shooting Rooster a sideways look.
“She’s not,” he said, breath catching. “She’s not my.” He cleared his throat. “Girlfriend.”
“Ah,” Jack said, smiling. “So that’s the problem.”
“What?”
“You’re in denial.”
Rooster curled his free hand into a fist on top of his thigh.
“Oh, come on,” Jack said. “A man doesn’t tie himself in knots over a woman he doesn’t love.”
“But she’s…”
“Like your sister? Your kid? Sure, I’ll buy that.” He sounded truthful, staring steadily at Rooster until Rooster lost his nerve and turned away. “But I don’t think so,” he tacked on, quietly.
Rooster fixed his gaze on the goldfish pond and said nothing.
“Kid,” Jake said, kindly, “it’s not anything to be ashamed of.”
Rooster took a deep breath and let it out slow. “I’m supposed to have her back.” It was an admission, and he hated that he’d let it slip. He was too tired, too off his guard, too vulnerable. He should stop talking now.
“There any rule that says you can’t do that just because you’re in love with her?” Jake asked. “I love my wife more than anything. You think I don’t have her back?”
He swallowed, felt like he was choking.
“Okay,” Jack said, “I won’t push.” He took a swig of his beer. “You ready for dinner?”
~*~
There was a deep-bellied laundry sink in the garage, and Jack took him there first to scrub the grime from under his nails. “Boots gotta come off, too,” he said with a note of apology. “Vicki’s real particular about the cleanliness of her kitchen.”
Like his own mother, once upon a time, Rooster thought, and then immediately dismissed. Nostalgia wasn’t what he needed on top of his anxiety.
Red was setting the table when they walked in, and she glanced up, wide smile breaking across her face when she saw him.
His stomach turned over, and he fought the urge to divert his gaze.
“We made spaghetti,” she said by way of greeting, giddy. “With homemade meatballs.”
“Smells good,” he said, voice thin. Because it did. But also, she looked…
Pink-cheeked. Hair curled at the ends from the heat of the stove. She’d folded her jacket over the back of a chair, and rolled up the sleeves of her shirt – a washed-soft flannel that had once been his, and finally shrunk enough in the dryer that he’d passed it down to her.
He forced his eyes down to the table, just to pull them away from her.
“Did you boys get a lot done today?” Vicki asked, bustling up to the table with a giant bowl of salad. She smiled at Rooster like he wasn’t the scariest thing she’d ever had in her kitchen, warm and welcoming.
“I can’t take any credit,” Jack said, clapping Rooster on the shoulder. He flinched; old habit. Jack patted him and pulled his hand back. “It’s all this one. He’s a worker.”
“Wonderful!” Vicki said. “I bet you’re starving.”
“I could eat,” he said, though his stomach was in knots.
“Ruby’s been such a help today,” Vicki continued, either ignoring or not noticing the tension in him. “Couldn’t have done it without her.”
Red looked pleased, the food smelled wonderful, dusk was falling beyond the window above the sink. Jack and his wife moved around one another with an ease born of long years living together. There was no reason not to relax into the moment.
So he did.
~*~
They were almost back to the garage, walking in the cool dark of evening, before Red was able to name the sensation buoying her every step: hope.
She tipped her head back and smiled up at the stars; her breath plumed. Nights were cold out west, even in the summer, and fall was fast approaching. When she inhaled, she could smell the first faint hints of ripening grass that heralded the change of seasons.
To her surprise, Rooster seemed relaxed beside her – as relaxed as he was capable of being, anyway. He still scanned their surroundings, but his head was on a slow swivel, so it seemed accidental. His hands swung at his sides, relaxed and easy, and he radiated a tired sort of contentment that was nothing like his usual tightly-coiled tension after a day spent driving. A day of hard physical labor had been good for him, she decided, even if it meant he would burn through the power she’d given him faster.
“What are you looking at?” he asked, teasing, and she realized she was staring at him as they walked; at the moment, he was staring back. She caught the edge of a smile in the glow of a streetlight.
She felt her face warm, but she didn’t turn away, made bold by the fizzing hope in her chest. “You seem happy.”
“Yeah?” He did turn away then, ducking his face a little, hands going in his jacket pockets. Doubt in his voice.
“Yeah. I like them – Jack and Vicki. They seem…normal.”
He snorted. “Don’t get much of that, huh?”
“No,” she agreed.
There had been a moment, when she first stepped into Vicki’s kitchen, when the woman had turned to Red and said, “Well, hi there, aren’t you just precious,” when Red had wanted to bolt. It had been instinct, plain and simple. Women said that sort of thing to her here and there: waitresses in diners, shop owners wanting her to buy something – like the lady who’d sold her the fringed jacket. But beyond a shy smile and a murmured “thank you,” she hadn’t ever had to interact with someone like that. With any woman. She had no friends aside from Rooster; there was no warm, nurturing female presence in her life. She’d seen mothers on TV, had ached for one, though she’d never say so aloud and make Rooster think that he was inadequate, because he wasn’t. But she’d always wanted, had kept her longing to herself, and then, suddenly, she was being handed an apron and asked if she knew anything about pie crust, and it was overwhelming. She didn’t know how to be a woman in another woman’s kitchen. Surely it would show: her strangeness. The fact that she was an escaped lab rat who was maybe, sort of deep in love with the only stable presence in her life. Surely Vicki would take a good look at her and know that her hair was the wrong color, and that she lived out of duffel bags, and that men had died because of her.
Easier to run away than face any of that. It was what they did, after all, she and Rooster: they ran.
But Vicki had said, “I’ve already got some dough in the fridge, we’ll just roll it out.” She sprinkled flour over a wooden cutting board, and then Red was caught, ensnared by the lure of maternal comfort. She’d jumped willingly into the trap at that point.
“What’d y’all do all day?” Rooster asked.
She smiled. He’d tried to scrape it away, but his Southern accent came out when he was tired. “We made pies. And cookies. And banana bread. They’re having a bake sale day after tomorrow at the VA to raise money for a new pool, and Vicki and her friends are supplying all the stuff they’ll sell.”
She glanced over and found that his shoulders looked a little tight now, straining at the back of his jacket.
She said the next part slowly, braced against his inevitable reaction. “She invited me to come and help work the table. Said they could use an extra set of hands.”
A pebble went skittering across the asphalt, pinged off the toe of Rooster’s boot. She didn’t know if he’d kicked it on purpose, but when she glanced over she could see that he was frowning, brows drawn together over his eyes now, when before he’d been expressionless. “Probably a bad idea.”
He said that a lot. It was probably a bad idea to visit the same city twice. To blow their money on a hotel with a jacuzzi tub. To talk to strangers unless absolutely necessary. To let Deshawn keep tabs on them. Red never pushed back – but tonight she did.
“Why?”
He glanced over sharply, frown deepening. “Why?”
“People have already seen us around town. We’re stuck here. What would it hurt?” She asked it sweetly, with a smile.
He shook his head. “Being visible’s a risk.”
“We’re visible right now.”
“We’re alone right now. If something happened – if somebody popped up – I could grab you and shelter behind those bushes. Get behind that wall.” He pointed to those places, voice falling into the clipped, matter-of-fact cadence of a man in an active war zone. She’d done that to him, she thought with a sudden pang; she’d created a war zone from which he could never escape, because it followed them – her – everywhere. “There’s good cover there, and there, and there. We go through that yard, and it’s a clear shot to the motel. We break into a car, we hotwire it–”
“Rooster,” she said, throat tight.
“You drop me anyplace on the map, and I can have five exit strategies worked out in ten minutes. That’s what a Marine does. But you go into some – some fucking VA center,” he spat the word like it disgusted him, and this, this blowup? It wasn’t just about exit strategy. “What is that? A brick box with tiny windows. And I can get outta there, sure, but how much warning will I have? Hostiles on all sides, civilians getting hurt. And you’re up there, right in the front, everybody looking at you, and–”
“Everybody looks at me when I do a show,” she reminded gently.
“Yeah, and then we fucking leave town!” He made a wide, encompassing gesture with both arms. “But we’re stuck here. We’re stuck. And–” He broke off, shook his head, raked his hair back with a shaking hand. “I can’t do my job like that. Don’t ask me to.”
Job.
The word hit her like a fist in the gut.
“I’m your job?” she asked, lips numb. They’d come to a halt in the middle of the street, and he turned to face her.
“It’s my job to keep you safe,” he said, voice dark with fury. “It’s my only job. Most days I can’t get it right as it is. Why would a goddamn bake sale be worth making it that much harder?”
It hurt to swallow. She wrapped her arms tight around her middle. “I’m your job,” she repeated, a statement and not a question this time, because this was the truth. She was his cross to bear. Because she was young, because she was a lab rat with no life experience, she’d talked herself into believing that he felt the way she did; that the dark felt too heavy, lately, and the other’s breathing seemed a little too loud, and a little too far away in the next bed. But she was his job. His mission, and he was a warrior who didn’t know how to let go of the war.
He stared at her, chest working as he breathed.
“I’m sorry I made it hard for you,” she said, tonelessly, and started walking again.
Inside her, something fractured.
~*~
She got three steps ahead of him before he realized what she’d just said.
And what he’d just said.
Damn, he was stupid.
He was just so scared. That he’d lose her, that he’d fail.
That she wanted the same thing it was getting harder and harder to deny.
“Shit,” he muttered, and caught up to her in three long strides.
She walked with her arms banded tight around her midsection, head down, hair shielding her face from view.
“I’m trying to protect you,” he said, feeling helpless.
“I know,” she whispered.
“That’s all I ever want to do.”
She jerked a nod, hair swinging.
“Red–”
“It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t, and because he was an idiot he didn’t know how to get them back to where they’d been only minutes before. Peace never lasted, no; that was one of the few things in life about which he was absolutely certain. They’d walked down Jack and Vicki’s front sidewalk with full bellies and something almost like contentment brewing between them.
And now it was nothing but anxiety and air as brittle as cheap glass.
They walked all the way back to the hotel in silence, the quivering, loaded kind that made him trigger-happy. By the time he’d let them back in their room, cleared it, and triple-checked that the door was locked and the drapes drawn, he’d worked himself up to saying something. He didn’t know what, and it probably wouldn’t help, but he had to try.
Red beat him to it.
When he turned around to face her, she looked up at him with huge, haunted green eyes, face starkly pale between two curtains of black hair. “You don’t have to do it. Protect me. You could stop.” She didn’t do artifice, his girl, and she wasn’t calling on it now. The steadiness of her gaze, the trembling of the rest of her body: she was serious.
His chest squeezed. “What?”
“You don’t have a life,” she went on, flat, already pulling herself back from him emotionally. “You said it yourself – you only have one job. That’s not fair to you. You deserve–”
He moved. Quick, sudden. Stepped in close until she had to tip her head back to maintain eye contact. She swallowed a sound that might have been a gasp.
“Stop it,” he said, aiming for stern, but he heard the way his voice shook and cracked at the edges. He was terrified, and knew he sounded it. He didn’t care. “That’s not true – I don’t – you can’t–”
“It’s okay.”
“Don’t say that!” he snapped, hating that she flinched back from him, but not able to rein himself in. “How could you think that I–”
“You gave up everything for me,” she said, voice strained. “Your home, and your friends, and your whole life–”
“What life? Huh? I could barely walk; I couldn’t be awake unless I was drunk off my ass because my whole damn body hurt so much. I was leeching off my friends ‘cause they were too decent to kick me out on my ass where I belonged–”
“You didn’t ask for this–”
“Neither did you! What they did to you at that place, the things that – fuck them. Fuck them to hell and back, I can’t wait until the day I get my hands on them, instead of their flying monkeys. It is not okay what they did to you, Red. You didn’t even have a goddamn name when I met you.”
“I shouldn’t have followed you home. I had no right to ask you–”
“You didn’t ask me for shit. Understand? That was my choice–”
“But if I’m a burden–”
“You’re not a burden! You’re my job, yeah, but you know what that means? It means I take it seriously. Keeping you safe is the most serious goddamn thing on this planet to me, because you’re mine. You don’t belong to that place, you never did. You belong to me. Damn it, Red, I do all of this because I love you, not because I have to.”
Someone in the next room banged on the wall. “Shut up!”
They both jumped, strung tight as racehorses. And then they settled, and stared at one another. Breathing through their mouths.
Rooster wished a sudden earthquake would split the world open and swallow him whole. The way she was looking at him…he just…
He cleared his throat. His face felt hot and it took him a moment to realize that he was blushing – possibly for the first time ever. “I, uh…” He coughed. “I didn’t…mean it like that. All…caveman-y and shit. That’s not…I mean…”
She threw herself at him. Pressed her face to his breastbone and wrapped her arms tight around his waist. Gasped, and shuddered, and stood trembling against him.
A sensation too visceral and painful to be called relief swelled inside him, surged out of the cracks of something dark and ugly that had fractured when she grabbed for him, unhesitating and trusting. He put his arms around her in turn, hand cradling the back of her head, holding her there.
Her lips moved against his chest, a quiet murmuring he couldn’t hear.
He dropped his face into her hair, trying to hear, but trying to get closer, too. Smell her shampoo, and her skin, feel the warmth of her, even though she shivered like she was cold. “What?”
It was a chant: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m…”
“No,” he said. “No, no, sweetheart. Don’t be sorry.”
But he was, because he’d made her cry, and made her think that he would abandon her. That was maybe the worst thing he’d ever done.
“Red, listen to me,” he said, as gently as he could manage. “And listen good, because you know I’m not any good with words, so I probably won’t be able to repeat it.”
She sniffled, and made a noise that might have been a weak chuckle.
“I – I died over there. The thing they loaded in that helo that day was just a corpse.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. You gave me a reason to get up in the mornings again. Made it so I can. So don’t…” He trailed off into a sigh. He wasn’t saying this right, and he knew he never could, but it was important. “I don’t know how all of this is gonna turn out in the long run.” Secretly, he knew that there was a clock somewhere, ticking down to the zero hour when he finally got caught unawares and taken out. Just like he’d known on this last deployment, when he’d shielded Deshawn with his body: his days were numbered; he gave them willingly so that someone worthier might live. But. “But I’ll never walk away,” he told her. “I won’t ever leave you. So get that out of your head right now, alright? I can’t promise I won’t be kinda crazy.”
She tipped her head back, her chin resting on his sternum, tear-bright eyes looking up into his. A crooked, tremulous little smile touched her mouth.
“I’m a Marine, kid, it just comes with the territory.”
“I know.” She settled again, cheek pressed over his thudding heart. “I’m just sorry you don’t get to do normal things.”
“What’s normal, huh? Rush hour traffic and the bar scene? Nuh-uh. I ain’t missing that.”
She hesitated a breath, and then, just a whisper: “You could have a family.”
He squeezed her gently, combed his fingers through her hair. “I have a family. Right here with you.”
She dug the tip of her little nose into the groove under his pec and dissolved into silent, shaking tears.
Rooster held her, rocked them side-to-side, for a long time.